


to end is to make a beginning

by todreaminscarlet



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types, Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Hogwarts AU, in line with hp canon, nothing graphic, susan's story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-12
Updated: 2016-04-12
Packaged: 2018-06-01 21:15:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6536575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/todreaminscarlet/pseuds/todreaminscarlet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She ignores the darkness; she ignores Tom’s desperation and impatience and need to know the secrets that no man should know; she ignores his search for immortality–that golden apple that will ensure his perpetual youth. It’s easy to ignore. Until it isn’t.</p>
            </blockquote>





	to end is to make a beginning

**Author's Note:**

> wrote this on tumblr for an anon ages ago. just dropping it off here.

It’s so easy in the beginning. It’s so easy to be swept away and to run away with him. Her siblings are gone (their sad faces and guilty pressure gone too), and she’s hurt and broken and _angry_. Her siblings are gone, and her memories are shoved away in the back of her mind, and it’s so easy in the beginning. 

They travel the world together, just the two of them (and it felt like freedom then). They see everything, and they _learn,_ and Susan loses herself in the sweeping tide of love and loss and knowledge. Tom is everything in those days; Tom with his dark, fathomless eyes and dimpled cheeks and carefully swept hair (and she is the only one who sees him when he is laid bare; when he is frustrated and angry and his hair falls down on his forehead late at night. It is a privilege she treasures.) 

She ignores the darkness; she ignores Tom’s desperation and impatience and need to know the secrets that no man should know; she ignores his search for immortality–that golden apple that will ensure his perpetual youth. It’s easy to ignore. 

Until it isn’t. And Susan will never voice what made her stop, what made her stomach turn and her heart freeze (what made her _run_ ); she keeps it locked in the pit of her soul and the awareness of what she made herself blind to destroys her. 

She ignored this. She ignored this darkness, which swept over everything and defined everything. She ignored the truth and the light in favor of this love from a twisted monster. ( _How easy it had been to forget_ , Susan thinks later. _How easy it had been to ignore it and to look with the rose-tinted eyes of a lover. How easy it had been to embrace the darkness in her own way; to feed it with her grief and anger and the sickening, twisted love from a power-obsessed man_.)

She runs. 

* * *

She runs back to England, to the shelter of war-torn London, to the places haunted with memories of her siblings, and she tries to make sense of it. She tries to reconcile the person she now remembers with this guilt-stricken stranger. She haunts the streets of Finchley and remembers the green, sunlit hills of Narnia, the golden majesty of Cair Paravel. 

She doesn’t stay. She hears rumbles in the alleys of a _Lord Voldemort_ , and she gathers her things and runs. 

(It briefly occurs to her that she is a witch and a queen, and that she has a duty to stand her ground. But it’s too much, she thinks. She knows too much and yet too little, and she _cannot_. She runs.)

She goes to America; she remembers its people’s confidence and the bright flashes of color during war, and it’s easy to make a home for herself. It’s easy to fit in with the muggles of New York and to create a corner of the world just for her. She doesn’t use magic. She sets out bowls of milk for alley cats and tends plants with just water and sun, and she goes to bed at night and to work in the day, and she lets the energy of the city heal her (and she tries to desperately to forget). 

(She ignores the irony that _forgetting_ was what made everything fall apart.)

Years go by, and Susan slowly puts it aside. She learns to breathe and to not jump at shadows; she learns to forgive herself and to put away the love that haunts her even now (because it was everything, and how to you separate yourself from everything. Susan doesn’t think she’s ever known how to do it properly.)

She grows older. Time passes. (And she ignores the news as much as she can.)

_Lord Voldemort_ is everywhere. The news is full of the reports, of the hate spewing from England, and Susan _knows_. She knows, and she grieves, and she might go back if she was not so afraid (not just of his power, but of herself. That she might look at the twisted face of the man she once loved and realize she loves him still; that she might be given a choice, and choose wrongly.)

So she stays. She stays, and she bites her nails and frets and ignores–and it all ends. Voldemort gone, some young couple gone, a boy made an orphan (and she’d grieve for him, if she didn’t know that there were so many more). 

* * *

Ten more years pass, and Dumbledore comes knocking. She opens the door and sees his bearded face and her heart sinks (because he did not come twenty, ten years ago, but he is here now, and the omen is such that she can only sink into a chair and wait). 

(Her premonition was right.)

(It’s worse.)

_Come back_ , Dumbledore says, and Susan looks around at her small apartment, at the plants by the window, the worn chairs by the table, at the apartment teaming with life and built by forgiveness, and she does not want to leave. _We need your knowledge_ , he tells her, and there’s a part of her that doesn’t want to help. 

_I left you alone then_ , he says, and Susan looks to him in surprise. _Did you think I didn’t know where you were,_  he says, and Susan thinks he’s almost amused. _I thought that we could fight without you, and that it would be better if you were away._

_Why did you change your mind_ , the bitterness in Susan wants to ask. 

_I’ll be by tomorrow_ , Dumbledore says, and he pushes himself up and leaves. 

Fifty years of this, Susan thinks. Fifty years of waiting, of love, of grief, of struggle, and it has led to this. She doesn’t want to face it, to own to it (that she loved him, that she was loved by him; that she knew him and stayed with him). 

* * *

She goes back to England. 

There’s really not a choice in the end. 

She was always going to go back. 

She goes back, and she tells Dumbledore everything, and when he tells her to wait, she refuses. This is her battle now, and she is a Queen, and if she must fight, she will always win (in this, nothing has changed). She tells the Order what they must know, and they prepare. 

She tells them about the horocruxes and the murders, and Dumbledore does not have the opportunity to censor the information. When he tells them all that children are too young for such knowledge, Susan remembers four children who ran a nation and fought in battles, and she remembers children who daydreamed of immortality, and it is Susan who knows that children are far more than others assume. It is Susan who tells Harry. 

It is Susan who goes back to Hogwarts to wait and to protect; it is Susan who pours over texts and does the work she should have done forty years before. It is Susan who pulls out her wand and remembers forgotten curses and spells and prepares herself for war. 

(She haunts the halls of Hogwarts like a specter and remembers the days of old, when war was far away and four siblings ran through these halls and pretended this was another castle. She wanders the corridors and remembers, and hopes that it is not too late to make things right.)

It is Susan to whom Harry comes when he has questions, when Sirius is gone and Lupin is away and Dumbledore ignores him, and she answers his questions. 

Dumbledore calls her to his office, and she pushes aside the anger and humiliation and answers all his questions. They are tense these two, mutual allies in the same war, but Susan cannot let go of her uncertainty of how much Dumbledore knew (how long did he watch her? how long did he wait to use her?). 

She teaches Harry in the evenings, and Harry teaches the others, and she wishes that children could stop going to war. 

(She is not so naive as to think they will not have to.)

She doesn’t run. 

* * *

The years creep on; she knows the moment is coming soon, but she doesn’t run. This will be her redemption, this will be her act of salvation (to face what she once did, to acknowledge the evil she once ignored, to help when she once ran away). 

She joins the Order in rescuing whoever they can, but it is never enough. (It’s still something though, still families saved, lives spared, but it is not enough, not now, not after years and so many wars and so much hate.)

They worked to find the horocruxes, but they did not find them all in time, and it is still Harry and Hermione and Ron who must go searching, and Susan stays in the shadows of Hogwarts and waits. (Events were put in motion long ago, and the wheels of time and history keep turning, and certain things must happen, no matter the story, no matter its players.)

It is a long year. 

She doesn’t run.

* * *

It ends in a battle, and Susan pulls out the bow and arrows she stashed months ago and slips her wand into its holster, and she goes to war. 

She answers Minerva’s call, and she joins the Order on the steps of Hogwarts, and she fights. Her arrows fly with unnerving accuracy and it is like sixty years have not passed. Her greying hair is pulled back from her eyes, and she is watching and waiting for the man she has never managed to forget. He doesn’t appear. 

The battle halts, and he calls for Harry, and there is nothing familiar in the timber of his voice. She is caught in her thoughts, in the memory of a boy with hair that shined blue under the lights of a great hall and eyes that would smile at her and only her, for only a moment, but it’s a moment too long and Harry is gone. 

Harry is gone, and she has failed him (failed Dumbledore and _PeterEdmundandLucy)._ She has failed the boy who came to her with hurt and anger and honest questions; the boy she allowed to go on an impossible quest, the boy who went and searched and fought and survived, and here in the last moment, she has failed. 

Hagrid comes carrying his precious burden, and it surprises her that that limp body is the first thing she sees. Because there, in the front, is _him_. The man with whom she ran away, the man for whom she denied herself, and it shocks her. There he stands, more monster than man, and she does not look to him (this feeling mixed with the grief and the anger tastes like freedom). 

His blood red eyes are peering over their crowd, and she feels the shock when he finds her. _I heard reports_ , he says to her, meters and meters apart. _I had hoped you had better sense_.  

_I finally found it_ , Susan tells him, and it feels like the last burden has been lifted. 

Susan looks up to the boulders of Hogwarts, at the steady stone teeming with life, and she smiles. 

The battle continues, and Harry is suddenly alive and the snake is dead, and the battle rages on. They are in the Great Hall now, and she is fighting with her wand; she is fighting Tom. Spells are coming, and she is desperate, and this is the last stand. She sees a spell coming for Minerva, and without thinking, she flings herself in front of it. 

She is on the ground now, gasping, in pain. Harry and Tom are locked in battle; Harry is talking, then the spells fly fast and then faster, and suddenly, through the rushing in her ears, she hears the silence, then the dull thud of a body hitting the ground. 

Harry’s green eyes appear in her weakening vision, and the relief of it sweeps over her body. She has not failed; her redemption is won. She can go home now. Harry is holding her; her lungs are failing. The sky looks so open now; Harry’s eyes are filled with tears. 

She tries to smile. 

Behind Harry, there, by the window, she sees him– _Aslan_. 

He waits there, for her, and she smiles. 

_Come home, my child_ , Aslan says, and she runs. 

**Author's Note:**

> word of advice: don't drink wine & go on tumblr.


End file.
